Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, holds appointments as François Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is director of the François Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights; chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a major Harvard teaching hospital; and chair of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kim returned to Harvard in December 2005 after a three-year leave of absence at the World Health Organization (WHO).
While on leave, Dr. Kim was director of the WHO’s HIV/AIDS department, a post he was appointed to in March 2004 after serving as advisor to the WHO director-general. Dr. Kim oversaw all of WHO’s work related to HIV/AIDS, focusing on initiatives to help developing countries scale up their treatment, prevention, and care programs, including the “3x5” initiative designed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005. Dr. Kim has 20 years of experience in improving health in developing countries. He is a founding trustee and the former executive director of Partners In Health, a not-for-profit organization that supports a range of health programs in poor communities in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and the United States. An expert in tuberculosis, Dr. Kim has chaired or served on a number of committees on international TB policy.
He has conducted extensive research into effective and affordable strategies for treating strains of TB that are resistant to standard drugs. While at WHO, Dr. Kim was responsible for coordinating HIV efforts with the TB department. Dr. Kim trained dually as a physician and medical anthropologist. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Kim has been recognized on numerous occasions as a global leader and distinguished professional, including being awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2003; being named one of America's 25 best leaders by US News & World Report in 2005; and being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006. He was a contributing editor to the 2003 and 2004 World Health Report, and his edited volume Dying for Growth: Global Inequity and the Health of the Poor analyzes the effects of economic and political change on health outcomes in developing countries.
